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An Interview With Anika Manzoor

by Anika Manzoor

September 10, 2018

This interview with Anika Manzoor, was conducted and condensed by frank news. Anika recieved her MPP from Harvard Kennedy School in 2018 and is the Executive Director of the Youth Activism Project. She co-founded the Youth Activism Project’s very first campaign, School Girls Unite, at the age of 12.

Tatti: Would you start by telling me a bit about your activist history?

Anika: The thing about my activist history is the fact that I didn't really go out seeking activist opportunities. I didn't really know much about it. My family's from Bangladesh. When I first visited Bangladesh I had this revelation of what injustice looks like, because it's a very stratified country in terms of income and poverty. I think I had that kind of burgeoning sense of justice, but I didn't know how, I wasn't thinking about, "Oh, we need to ...". I didn't know that I could even do anything about it.

Four years after that experience, I had been invited to this awareness raising session in my community. My friend invited me and told me about the lack of girls education in developing countries, and how Bangladesh is one of the countries that needed the most action on this issue. That piqued my interest. At the end of it we were invited by the woman who led it to join her in creating a campaign to address the issue. All of it really was the fact that I was invited, rather than I was seeking out that kind of opportunity. I think that's really important. What we focus on with this activism project is trying to invite people, trying to bring people into the fold, because that allows us to reach a lot more people than we would have, and kind of activate people to join this global effort to bring justice in communities.

That's how I got involved with these activism projects. All of us at the meeting that day and Wendy Lesko, the one who had created this space for us, decided to create a campaign called School Girls Unite to address the issue of girls education in developing countries, or the lack thereof. That paved the pathway for the Youth Activism Project as a 501C3 to support other youth activist efforts. Like youth led social change efforts.

I was 12 years old when I got involved, and then stayed involved throughout middle school and high school.

What we did was a combination of philanthropy work and advocacy. We would lobby our congressman and our senators to increase foreign aid for education.

Then we also set up a scholarship program in Mali, Africa, and did various fundraising activities. That was kind of the extent of our activism. I engaged in that throughout middle school and high school. Then in college I still stayed involved with School Girls Unite.

During college I realized that being part of School Girls Unite was such a transformative experience for me. That kind of empowerment through activism is something that I wanted to share with other people who were like me, who understood these global injustices, but didn't really know how to get started. That became my mission, and evolved over the past couple of years until I decided to go back to the Youth Activism Project and work with Wendy to scale our efforts.

Tatti: What do you find most effective for bringing about change through activism?

Anika: That's an interesting question because I think it's actually a lot easier than what people think. This policy advocacy focus has been our bread and butter for the last 14 years. We're currently working on this guide. Our goal is to really provide accessible tools for young people to know how to engage in these processes. In that guide we pretty much provide concrete steps about where you can look for your local, state, and federal representatives. How do you know who they are? How do you know what kind of issues they're working on? Then how can you enter those spaces? What is the best way to position yourself?

We go through all of that, and it's really not that complicated. You just have to know where to look and what to say. Meeting with decision makers is something, in my experience, that has been incredibly empowering for me. We focus on that in terms of a key aspect.

Just because you can't vote doesn't mean that you're not a constituent with something meaningful to say. This is your right to be able to approach your decision makers. Raising that awareness.

We encourage people to explore a variety of tactics. We focus on policy advocacy, and there's a demand for that as well. Young people want to engage in that kind of activism. Protests are always a great way to rally support and bring about awareness of an issue. We really emphasize arts advocacy. We emphasize other ways to reach out to your decision makers, like doing a postcard writing campaign. We encourage our youth activists to think outside the box when it comes to their advocacy, because they want to be noticed. We're really supportive of the wide gamut of activist strategies.

In terms of what might not be as effective, I think people give a lot of flack to this whole idea of slactivism and internet activism. But I think there's also a purpose for that as well. There's a purpose for a viral hashtag. The internet is a great way to mobilize people for your cause. It's just, you definitely need to build upon social media tools. You can't just rely on that to do activism. That is definitely something that we firmly feel.

Tatti: It's so easy to participate now because of social media, but that also means that those with the largest voices aren't always those who are most informed. Can that be detrimental to a cause?

Anika: That's definitely something to watch out for, but I wouldn't want to say that it totally invalidates the use of the internet and social media as a tool to kind of promote awareness and bring people to the cause. I think it's something that seasoned activists should watch out for and combat. But I think there's so much good that comes out from using social media and the internet that it's definitely not an argument to not use it.

It's fruitless to say that people shouldn't use social media, because it's such an integral part of our lives now that people are always going to get on their soapbox on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter or whatever preferred platform. It's sort of this beast that we can't really ignore. We have to figure out how to guardrail against the negative aspects of activism as it relates to social media.

Tatti: Why is youth is so important to you? Why is that the group you decided to commit to and empower?

Anika: There's a lot of reasons for that. The first thing that comes to my mind is the individual empowerment. We focus on adolescents specifically. Youth is often used as this umbrella term to talk about people from childhood to early adulthood, and even kind of people reaching 30, which I think is pretty firmly adulthood. But somehow that's still youth.

Adolescence is such a tricky time. Not just in the United States, but around the world. There are so many pressures for young people to be a certain way. They're really coming into their selves during this time. Activism for me was this incredible outlet. It was so crucial for my development as a human being, and protected me from a lot of dumb things that affect the lives of young people. Like, "Oh. Am I liked enough?". All these anxieties that young people have. I was focused on something way beyond that through my activism. That kind of helped me, there was a higher purpose for me because I was engaged in this kind of work. I think that was just so powerful.

That's my primary motivating factor. Sharing that with other people who might not have access to it. Then of course the reason why it's so empowering is because you are actually producing change in your community. You're being a leader in your community and in your world. Young people are incredible activists. They bring a lot of assets to the whole activist world. They're idealistic. They're creative. They don't think like adults, so they're not as jaded or as confined by expectation. I think they have a little bit more flexibility to think outside the box, and command attention, because at least at this point it's not common. As an organization we want to change that. We want to make this common.

I think providing something really meaningful to this space is another reason why we focus so much on the adolescent group.

Without their efforts, these processes of change wouldn't happen. That's something to remember as well.

Then finally, these are our future voters. I think the biggest thing that we need to focus on is preparing them to be engaged citizens as they exercise their right to vote as they continue into adulthood. We believe that naturally, if you are exposed to these kinds of values and practices as a young person, it will inevitably continue on into your adulthood. We're living in a time when the rate of voting and engaging in political participation is at a global decline. We need to fix that for this rising generation.

A Rose In Harlem

by frank

November 18, 2018

This interview with the students of The Young Women's Leadership School of East Harlem was conducted and condensed by frank news.

From left to right: LaShay Fernandez, Morgan Carter, Javeria Amir, and Fargana Alden.

Morgan: Right now, we're learning about how to take an issue that we feel passionate about and see how we can impact our local government - legislative, the mayors, governors. To see how we can change the issue, or see if we can get more engagement so people will pay attention. The issue we all picked was sexual assault in schools, from colleges, middle schools, high schools...

Why did you choose that?

Morgan: At first, it was separated for a week. Some people wanted to do education and the other side wanted to do sexual assault. We were debating for a week or two and none of us wanted to do it together, and then eventually we just had to decide - why don't we just put them together? Now we're doing sexual assault in schools. And how education and money affects why we don't have sex ed.

That's amazing.

Javeria: There's this thing that there's enough about raising awareness for it. It's time for us to take action and the way we can take action is contacting our local office members rather than just going for the governor or the president. We're saying oh my god the President's doing this and what are we doing? We know we can't directly affect what the President is doing himself, but we can work at a local level which is what we're going to do now.

Who are your local officials?

Javeria: Our mayor and our city council members. We would start contacting them rather than the governor.

LaShay: We did a whole thing where we sat down with people in our neighborhood or district to look up all our local members and see what they're doing and see if they're good. We looked them up and really tried to see if our representatives are everyman or superman. To see how much of our representation is actually what we want, or actually accurately depicts the people that are there - us.

What's the conversation around sexual assault? What are the things you want to see done and what are the sort of modes of getting those things done?

Morgan: Today we learned about root causes and systemic causes. We're starting in elementary schools and high schools. People have sex ed, but we realized that a lot of the problem is that people don't actually know what counts as sexual assault. No one has consent classes. You can't just start at high school, because by that time a lot of people are already having sex. We said that maybe we could start with 7th and 8th graders and give them sexual education - maybe not assault, but basic knowledge so that later on they can know - this is what we do, this is how this works.

LaShay: It's very hard because since people are so young and it's such a fragile thing even though yeah, you should learn about it, we're also talking about different ways to tackle the situation. Instead of just saying "consent" and just straight talking about sex with 12 year olds, it's using different methods. There's this video that a college made about tea and offering people tea and it's really weird, but it really pushes the message of consent and not forcing people to do what they don't want to do.

It's also hard to figure out how we want to approach certain grades or approach people in general in ways that don't make their parents uncomfortable if their parents have an issue with talking about sexual assault and consent in classes.

Fargana: To add on, some parents don't have a lot of knowledge on sexual assault or how to to keep safe, or they feel uncomfortable talking about it. For us to teach kids at a young age about safe sex and just making sure everyone's using protection, what no means if someone is saying no to sexual intercourse. It's very important for us, and also since we are young teens, it'll be easier to talk to students because we're in the same generation in a way. We would just be considered like their older sister, we'll have that bond if they ever need something, we can help them out.

Are you learning about how to communicate with your representatives directly? How can you make sure your voice is heard outside of the classroom?

Javeria: We haven't gotten to that point yet. We're trying to figure out what part of the issues are we focusing on, what are the factors that are leading to such issues, and once we have those down, then we can go and be like this is what's wrong with our system, and this is what we have to fix. Once we get that correctly done, then we'll be approaching them, but we haven't learned how to do that yet.

Morgan: It's hard because sex ed is like - a lot of parents don't want their kids learning about that and it's not just girls, it's boys that have to learn about it, too. It's kind of hard knowing exactly what we want them to do because it's often a societal thing. It's hard for them to say, oh we want a rule against this. You have to make something specific.

Do you guys feel empowered by the class?

LaShay: Yes, I was just talking to a friend about it today because I think a lot of times we sit in our class, and especially going to TWYLS, we talk about this stuff, like since freshman year we've been talking about this stuff, and it's such a big issue and we always talk about it, but we never talk about what we're going to do about it. And I think sometimes when you're just in your little city, you think this is huge and this is happening in the government and I can't do anything about it.

I think one thing that I've definitely realized in the class is you can do something.

Even if you're starting small, it's a ripple effect. I think that's what the class has really done for me. I can do stuff, even if it's really small, it's important.

Javeria: People talk a lot and they don't do anything about it. We have a social justice club and I feel like that has empowered us in general and then having Generation Citizen - being able to take action now, instead of just talking about it. What should we do? I feel like it's a wonderful opportunity for us to have.

Fargana: In addition, compared to other schools, TYWLS really prepares you. We're really thankful to be offered Generation Citizen because in other schools, again, they would talk about it - or not even, the topic wouldn't even come up in their conversations - it would just be ignored rather than at least being talked about it and seeing different ways how we can help. For us to talk about it and see how we can fight as young teens, it really impacts us.

Can you tell us more about the social justice club?

Javeria: The social justice club is led by Jessica Taylor, our 10th grade global history teacher. In that club, anyone - I think it's mostly high schoolers - can come in the beginning of the year, we focus on an issue and advocate for the issue we think is affecting our community right now. We're in 10th grade and we raised some funds for the Syrian refugees, that was around $500 by doing food sales. It's just the little things we're doing. We're seeing what current issues are affecting the people around us. It's giving back and even though our school doesn't have that much, we're trying to take initiative.

Fargana: We donated a bunch of toiletries to a women's shelter as well. Every year we would do something - I think of it as a main project and then a mini project. So the mini things are some local things - like donate toiletries, donate money, and then our main project is what all of us are mainly focused on and how we can help.

That's amazing. Have you guys learned about civics anywhere other than Generation Citizen?

Morgan: I think some of us learn it at home, but in school, other than government or AP US History, not a lot. I think as a whole, they always push us to change something or if you feel something, talk about it, try to change it so not directly, but I think that we all get encouraged throughout our years of being here to try to change something.

We always give stuff even if we don't have it, we're always just trying - we're always taught say something, do something, don't just watch.

Javeria: Our government class is coming senior year, it's important, but other than that we're not used to having that - what policies are, how they're made. It's senior year and Generation Citizen. For me, even if we're in AP Government, you're getting that in senior year which is a little late, but.

We're teaching our kids too late and Generation Citizen is going to help us. It'll end that battle a little earlier.

How early do you think civics should start?

Javeria: I feel like middle school. They're going into that 9th grade year where they're like we're going to be like high school, and they're already empowered so you might as well give them another boost.

Fargana: Yeah, it would really impact a person if you're starting in middle school. It would be perfect to teach them about the government issues and who's your local representative, what does it mean? Then when you're in high school, as the years go by, you'll have more knowledge. Each grade, we can all come together and create a bond within us and be able to go out and do something. For seniors, since we're capable of doing it, we can continue it in college and teach others that really didn't have this opportunity when we were in high school.

Are any of you about to be 18?

Yes, yes.

Are you planning on voting?

Javeria: Yes! I was going to say that. Us turning 18 - I feel like this is encouraging me at least to vote. That's one of the ways my voice can be heard, so why not? I feel like that's part of the issue. We need to tell them - yeah, voting may seem like your voice is not heard at all, but we're the people and you're one person so we need all the people to make that voice be heard, so vote, please.

Are you excited to vote?

Javeria: Yes, I'm really excited. I've been waiting. I've been waiting to turn 18 so I can vote.

LaShay: I think it's so funny that she's acting like that because my parents don't vote and it's really weird. I'm always like why don't you vote? "Well it's not gonna matter." I'm really glad I took this class because you're influenced by your political socialization - you're influenced by the people that you're around, and you inherit these ideas and you're kind of conditioned to believe this one thing and I think before I came to TYWLS, I kind of did have that mindset of well, I can't make a change, I'm one person. I'm so excited to vote now and it's so weird because before I didn't think it would matter.

Fargana: I don't turn 18 until another year, my parents are immigrants - they're both US citizens - so it's for them, the only main election they worry about is presidential because that's the big one, but I feel like now that I have more knowledge on this, I'm literally waking my mom up early so she can come with me to go vote. Well, for her to vote, I'm just gonna be there making sure she's there.

Morgan: I'm the exact opposite. It's weird because my mom has always been - my mom is the kind of person, even if she doesn't like anybody on the ballot, she'll still vote. She's always told me to pay attention to what's going on and vote. And I was always just like, I don't really care, but I think Generation Citizen has made me really want to do something now because every single thing counts. I kind of wish, like a lot of things, that we would've learned it in middle school.

I think the problem is we underestimate young people. They think they're not old enough to understand it. When a lot of times, the middle schoolers know more than you think they do. Like a lot more. And I think that they need to start encouraging them and teaching them because I feel like 11th graders and 12th graders, we're about to leave, there's no point. I feel like if I would've heard it in 8th grade, maybe I would want to vote more. I can change a lot more things than I thought I could have.

Never underestimate the youth.

The Unlikely Combination of Comedy and Civics

by Caty Borum Chattoo

November 14, 2018

This interview with Caty Borum Chattoo, the Director of the Center for Media & Social Impact (CMSI) and Executive in Residence at the American University School of Communication in Washington, D.C., was conducted and condensed by frank news.

I've worked professionally for a number of years to engage people in serious social issues that matter. Over the years, that work has ranged from a research-based strategic communication approach to efforts focused on narrative and creativity, particularly documentary storytelling and comedy. At this point in my career, my work is deeply focused on understanding the role of creativity and culture in social change – in public engagement and civic practice. Over the years, I’ve worked on topics including environmental justice, H.I.V., reproductive health, global poverty, global development, maternal health, and others.

What I started to notice over the years of doing this work is that, while of course these serious issues require a serious approach, we also need to embrace entertaining and emotional routes to encouraging people to engage with tough topics.

Sometimes I think we risk only talking to ourselves when we believe that things like fact sheets and policy briefs are the only ways that culture progresses to become a more equitable and just place.

With this in mind, my efforts most recently have focused explicitly on the role of creativity, mediated storytelling, documentary storytelling, and comedy. I'll talk about both of those separately. I place creativity and story and culture at the center of efforts for social change because I believe so strongly that if we don't let some light and optimism and entertainment and fun into these issues, we're just going to continue to only talk to people who are already believers, people who already care, people who are already doing things.

We're just not going to move forward if we don't find other ways to communicate about serious social challenges.

Do you think one can avoid screaming into the echo chamber? We are so in control of what we see it's inherently isolating. I do the scroll and see celebrities posting about civic engagement and I always pause and wonder who they're talking to.

I deeply appreciate that question. Part of my own journey about that question began when I looked at my own work. I was doing serious documentary work about some issues and serious strategic communication campaigns to get people to engage in issues like reproductive health and drug use. I sat back and said, "I am really worried that I am now only talking to people like myself," and “like myself” can mean a lot of different things about our own echo chambers. I could say similar educational background, similar perspective within a coastal city, similar socio-economic class, similar race, gender, age.

So, maybe I'm just talking to people who already agree with me. I wanted to dig much deeper. With that guiding question, I am interested in understanding more about how can we engage people who are not already thinking about these issues that matter or perhaps are thinking about these issues in ways that are damaging or harmful. How can we engage people differently?

When we look at documentaries about social issues, they are deep. This are not explanatory talking head documentaries, not true crime documentaries, but documentaries that deeply look at social issues. Generally speaking, those are character-driven narratives, which means they're really telling a human story about one person or several people as a way to illustrate how they're living their lives dealing with x-issue. So x-issue an environmental justice issue or racism or some other form of discrimination.

What we know about storytelling from a research perspective is that when we experience stories, we can be transported into them. We have an emotional experience with those stories, we identify and connect with characters. When we're deeply experiencing a human narrative that's told beautifully, and artfully, and creatively with music and editing and pacing, we have an opportunity to reach people in their emotional selves, which is incredibly important for persuasion and adoption of ideas.

Over the last decade and a half or so, there's been a big movement and an entire professional ecology that's built up around the idea of groups that drive civic practice and community engagement using documentary at the forefront of that work. My forthcoming documentary book is focused on this work and its influence. My book is telling the stories of the movies and the civic engagement groups that work with documentaries at the heart of them. For example, these groups and filmmakers seek out NGOs and organizations and community groups and business groups and leaders who are already thinking about or dealing with an issue in a way from all different vantage points, and this fabric strengthens their movement-building, if you will, with the use of storytelling.

Number two, the preaching beyond the choir question. Many times you reach people differently with this kind of storytelling. We can bypass some of these divides that we have. That's one thing. Storytelling lives as a really particular way that can help us transcend some of what we think of as tribal differences.

Comedy is this unique cultural place where we can meet and find laughter and commonality. There's so much research about comedy that shows what happens when we experience characters that aren't like us. For example, there is research that talks about gay and lesbian characters on television and people who have the least interaction with gay and lesbian characters in real life are the most moved by comedy portrayals that portray them as human.

Comedy is important for social justice engagement as well because when comedians talk about social issues in their work, through sketch, or scripted work, or through satire, or through standup, they invite us in to have a moment of lightness and optimism. There are so many social justice topics where we've communicated almost exclusively based on what I call dire, hopeless, impossible odds for success

When we do that repetitively, we definitely raise the alarm. We raise awareness with the public. But we might be encouraging public disengagement. We might be encouraging people to not be involved in civic practice because it seems so impossible to deal with these issues at all.

For this book I'm writing with my co-author, Lauren Feldman, we focus on comedy and social justice. A lot of what we're writing and thinking about is what happens when social justice groups, civic engagement groups, choose to work with comedy and why did they choose to do it. They do it to open up conversations to topics, to find areas of commonality, and to find areas for hope and optimism and a different kind of emotional response to issues. Comedy is a great cultural unifier and allows us to communicate about social issues that are pretty serious in a different way. But of course, comedy isn't for everything.

What do you view as the baseline responsibilities of the public?

In a really broad sense, the idea is of the public sphere is an underpinning to how democracy functions ideally. The idea is that we have these institutions of power and generally speaking, the most potent institutions of power are state power, or the government, and economic power, or the corporate/business sector. In the midst of that is the role of the people. The role of the people and the role of public discourse, our access to information, our ability to talk with one another, our ability in a public space to talk and deliberate and negotiate social challenges as both an activity we do with one another as citizens, and as people who are practicing civics. That's important. And the voices of the people in that regard are also a check on those very potent forms of institutional power.

If we understand that, then we think of ourselves as publics, not just consumers. We're not just people that are buying things. We're not just people that are passive recipients of information.

We're people as publics – we can be engaged in working with one another for the public good. For common good: getting a stop sign on your street for example. It’s one of the classic examples of this idea, but of course it becomes much more nuanced when we consider more complex social challenges.

So, I would say at a really, really basic level of civic understanding is truly the idea that we are publics with some real power to make collective change.

Our ability to have civil discourse with one another is really important. I would say that is a very basic minimum.

It sounds so obvious, but we're in a moment where we're not even doing that very well. We're not even communicating with one another about our shared values. I think that's incredibly important as a certain basic minimum is just simply the reminder that we're not passive, we're not helpless, but that we must communicate with one another in order to solve our common challenges.

What role does education have in explaining civics and civic responsibility?

I love that question. At the risk of sounding like a real old-school person here, I think it's key. I think it is absolutely fundamental. We must, must, have strong civic practice and civic rights being taught in school.

Even this idea of the public sphere, the role of publics, all of that is actually really meaningful. The digital media age is deeply controlled advertising and brands and we could travel down this slippery slope to imagine that we are simply consumers – that we're just here to buy things and to accept information from brands.

I think civic education has to be taught in schools in a really strong way. The importance and the history of voting and frankly the importance and history of protest. Our country was created from protest. I think that kind of pride and responsibility, communal responsibility in civic practice is needed. But also, the tactical details of how to engage in behaviors like voting also needs to be taught. Let me give you an example.

In 2004, I was working for the TV producer and philanthropist Norman Lear. Norman Lear is also known as the guy who founded People For the American Way and has been a great and vocal supporter of civil engagement, particularly civic engagement for young people, for years.

I was working for Norman at the time as part of a youth civic engagement organization that he founded in 2002 called Declare Yourself. As a backdrop, young people as a cohort are historically are the least likely to register and least likely to vote. Rather than assume that young people were not voting or were going to vote if they cared enough about the issue, we facilitated research that revealed we the most important reason they were not voting, at that time, was because they did not know how to actually register in the first place. In a well-meaning social change effort, if we had created a whole campaign that was focused on motivating young people about issues along, we would have failed. The objective was to register young people to vote.

What we learned, back to your question, was that they actually didn't understand the mechanics of voter registration. By the way, voter registration. Super complicated. Because it differs state by state, as you know. The deadlines differ, whether you can do paper or online differs. If you can do it at the DMV or some other place differs by state. They're turning 18 when they finish high school. They need to learn this in school when they're 16.

That's profoundly important and goes back to the role of education that needs to be involved... education that needs to help young people learn about the institutions of democracy and civic practice. They need to learn about the philosophy of why it matters and how democracy works. They need to learn the tactical realities of how to actually do these things: how to vote, how to be involved in public comment periods, and regulatory actions and so on.

Yes, I think education is incredibly important. I don't think it just starts in middle school and high school, I think we need to do it in college which many of us do.

Research also shows that when young people vote for the first time at 18, they're much more likely to be lifelong voters. Getting them early is really important.

I work with young people, and I love young people. I teach college students and graduate students, and I hear their perspectives all the time. They know so much more about so many things than we Gen-Xers did at their age. But we are not absolved of our responsibility as their educators. We still have to teach how civic practice works and how to do it.

frank news is dedicated to storytelling across all mediums. A space for debate, discussion, and connection between experts and a curious readership. Topics are presented monthly with content delivered daily.

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